The archive.

Sincere reformers and demagogues alike have reached for the same lever—state action—to abolish poverty, and in Hazlitt's telling they have mostly made it worse. This 1971 Freeman polemic dismantles a catalogue of political remedies: redistribution and the guaranteed income, union privilege and featherbedding, minimum-wage laws, welfare finance, price and wage controls, and finally socialism itself. His method is to look past the visible transfer to the hidden cost—who pays, whose incentives collapse, what output is never produced. A statutory wage floor, he insists, cannot conjure the productivity it names; it only prices the least-skilled out of work. Socialism's deeper failure is the calculation problem: without genuine prices for capital goods, planners cannot rank alternatives except by imitating the market they reject. Durable relief, he concludes, rests on productivity, not command.

We cannot make a man worth a given amount by making it illegal for anyone to offer him less.

Freedom, inequality, and the division of labor are not separable social accidents but mutually supporting conditions of civilization, so runs the thesis of an essay first delivered to a 1970 symposium and reissued in 1991 with a combative new introduction. Because each person is a unique, non-interchangeable individual, Rothbard argues, liberty is the precondition of human development; and only a developed division of labor, rooted in the natural diversity Mises made central, gives individuality the scope to flourish. Egalitarianism, Marxist, Romantic, primitivist, he treats as a single anti-differentiating impulse, from Marx's fantasy of hunting, fishing, and criticizing at will to the lookism and quotas of what the new introduction calls political correctness. Equality taken literally means sameness; against it he defends the older liberal equality of liberty, and natural aristocracies that rise through voluntary excellence rather than force.

He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human.

Allowing international trade in a growth model does not guarantee that trade will occur—or that a feasible growth path will be efficient. In this 1971 contribution, republished in 2013, Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson revisit their open-economy extension of the von Neumann model by removing an assumption that had helped secure positive-valued trade. Their distinctive concern is the distance between mathematical possibility and economic interpretation. A numerical example permits the expansion factor to fall below the interest factor; two internal accounting indices then clarify why the authors regard such solutions as economically uninteresting for a one-country economy. Readers can discover how price and activity bounds shape that judgement, and why the authors favor economically transparent axioms over formal compression.

Ninety days of frozen wages and prices gave Nixon's New Economic Policy of August 1971 its drama, but Haberler asks the harder question of what happens once the freeze is lifted. A freeze, he warns, suspends visible price changes without touching demand, wage bargaining, or credibility; hold it too long and it breeds evasion, bureaucracy, and corruption. The essay's hinge is a distinction between two incomes policies: guideposts and controls that substitute official judgment for the market, and reforms that restore competition by curbing union privileges, revising Davis-Bacon and minimum-wage rules, ending strike subsidies, and opening the door to imports. Sustained inflation, he holds, is always monetary, yet monopoly unions can still force authorities to choose between validating wage push and accepting unemployment. Business monopoly, by contrast, produces mostly one-shot effects and matters far less to a continuing spiral.

Industrial monopolies or oligopolies are not much of a problem as far as inflation is concerned.

Oskar Lange had been Mises's most formidable socialist antagonist; his final, posthumous treatise, Rothbard argues, quietly retreated toward the praxeology it once opposed. Reading Lange's late Political Economy, Rothbard tracks the concessions: that monetary calculation and profit-seeking made rational conduct explicit, that economic laws can be deduced from broad axioms of rational action, that Austrian utility theory is ordinal preference rather than hedonistic psychology. Each admission carries a threat Lange cannot face—if economics simply is praxeology, Marxism forfeits its claim to be the foundational science of historical economic forms. So Lange widens praxeology to swallow cybernetics, programming, and input-output analysis, grafting institutional categories onto the logic of choice. Rothbard reads the maneuver as evasion, and draws the larger point: the calculation debate was always also a contest over the foundations of economics.

In this way, Lange accepts the essential deductive Misesian methodology for economic theory: beginning with broadly general praxeological principles as axioms and from these elaborating necessary laws by logical deduction.

Lachmann casts Mises as the economist who decisively rejected equilibrium as the master concept of economics and put the market process in its place. Contemporary neoclassical theory he indicts as 'late classical formalism,' mathematically elegant yet mute on real problems like permanent inflation, because it abstracts from choice, alternatives, and uncertainty. The newer models of steady growth—Cassel, Harrod, Domar, Solow—fare no better, since continuous coordination would demand perfect foresight and the instantaneous rearrangement of heterogeneous capital. Because knowledge is unevenly held and interpreted, expectations diverge and plans must fail. What survives is individual equilibrium, never the system-wide kind; the market is millions of people seeking their own equilibria within an order that never reaches a general one.

But in doing so they have taken the shadow of the formal apparatus for the substance of the real subject matter.

Borrowing Thomas Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions while refusing its relativism, this essay diagnoses modern economics as a discipline capable of forgetting its own discoveries. Lacking laboratory tests and saturated with ideology, it entrenched a false paradigm through mathematics, positivist testing, and professional prestige — burying the Austrian School in the process. Rothbard reads the eclipse of Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises not as refutation but as collective amnesia, sharpened by late translations and Mises's denial of a prestigious American post. Yet criticism alone topples no paradigm; it must be replaced. Mises supplies the replacement through praxeology, the deductive science of human action, from which follow the critique of cumulative interventionism, commodity money as a check on inflationary credit, and the calculation argument that an economy without private ownership has no real prices to reason with.

But the work of Ludwig von Mises furnishes that “something”; it furnishes an economics grounded not on the aping of physical science, but on the very nature of man and of individual choice.

Can a market-oriented reform make government more powerful rather than less? In this essay, first published in 1971 and reprinted here in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard turns that question against Milton Friedman’s reputation as a champion of economic liberty. Tax withholding, guaranteed income, and a fixed monetary-growth rule become tests of the difference between limiting coercion and improving its administration. Writing from an Austrian and libertarian perspective, Rothbard argues that freedom in individual markets cannot be insulated from state control over taxation and money. His polemic exposes a fault line within free-market thought: whether predictable rules and competitive provision suffice, or whether compulsory financing and monetary monopoly compromise the project itself. Readers can discover why proposals defended as market-friendly attract resistance from within the libertarian camp.

A child can acquire a parent’s skills without inheriting them genetically—or understanding how they work. This distinction anchors Hayek’s 1971 review of C. D. Darlington’s The Evolution of Man and Society. Welcoming Darlington’s attention to innate differences, Hayek challenges his tendency to equate unconscious conduct with genetic determination. Imitation and upbringing, he argues, transmit practical knowledge that neither teacher nor learner can necessarily articulate. The review offers a precise way to question claims about inherited abilities: what evidence distinguishes biological descent from the cultural transmission accompanying it? Hayek’s alternative also carries a warning. Skills accumulated across generations can disappear when the practices sustaining them are broken, making cultural achievement more vulnerable than genetic endowment.

But we must not confuse the inherited capacity to learn a great variety of modes of conduct with an heredity of particular modes of conduct.

When Washington stopped buying and selling gold in August 1971, the official thirty-five dollars an ounce ceased to be a price and became a mere bookkeeping entry — and most of the ensuing debate, Machlup contends, mistook that accounting figure for an operative economic force. Devaluing the dollar in gold would change nothing real: trade, employment, and competitiveness turn on exchange rates set in the market, not on how governments label their gold stocks. He dismisses the talk of burden sharing as claptrap, separates genuine transfer burdens from the mercantilist pseudo-burden of forgone reserves, and warns that raising gold's book value would keep alive the illusion of restored gold convertibility. What matters instead is purchasing power: no asset serves as a reserve unless its holder knows what he can get for it.

Where there are no sales, no purchases, and no exchanges of gold against dollars, there can be neither a price nor an exchange value of gold in dollars.

Aid to poor countries is laudable; producing it by attaching international reserve creation to development finance is not. That is the disciplined case Haberler mounts against the "Link" between IMF special drawing rights and assistance to less developed countries. Reserve allocation answers to payments, trade variability, and liquidity, he argues, while aid answers to income, wealth, and welfare; fusing the two would rationalize neither and turn every SDR decision into a distributive struggle. The Link is inherently inflationary, since reserves allocated for development are designed to be spent, and even the subtler non-inflationary version proposed by Karlik and Scitovsky would yield little. Aid should instead be voted openly through the budget, its burden made explicit rather than scattered by IMF quotas and balance-of-payments accidents - a tax lottery in place of a tax system.

This argument again mixes reserves and aid.

Two charges anchor the socialist case against capitalism: that it produces too little and distributes what it makes unjustly. Answering both, Hazlitt insists that nominal-dollar comparisons mislead, deflating U.S. output from 1939 to 1969 to show real income climbing across every quintile, with electricity, plumbing, automobiles and telephones passing from luxuries into ordinary working-class possessions. Against the exploitation thesis he shows payrolls dwarfing after-tax profits and argues that wages and profits rise and fall together rather than warring over a fixed fund. His sharpest move is linguistic: the very phrase 'distribution of income' falsely implies that goods are first produced and then parceled out, when in a market they are owned throughout continuous production and exchange. The cure for poverty, he concludes, is greater earning power, not redistribution.

When profits are large, it does not mean that they are at the expense of the workers. The opposite is more likely to be true.